Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century: Novels

It is one of the great ironies of American life that the U. S. military,
though it is necessarily one of our least democratic institutions, offers
many young people a unique opportunity to realize the American dream.
This is so because in addition to providing them with training and instilling
discipline, it has, for the most part, functioned as a meritocracy.
Which is not to suggest that it has been devoid of politics or racism,
but that in general it has been a place where a talented young man could
rise through the ranks, provided that he could tolerate the restrictive
lifestyle and function within the command structure. This tension
though--between opportunity on the one hand and the requirement of submission
on the other--makes the military a natural setting for a novel, where an
author can exploit these conflicting themes.

Most would probably argue that From
Here to Eternity is the greatest American novel of military life (as
distinguished from novels about actual combat, like Red
Badge of Courage and The Killer
Angels), indeed it made the Modern Library Top
100 and it is excellent, but The Sand Pebbles is even better
and Jake Holman is one of the quintessential heroes in all of American
literature. Jake, like his fellow anti-heroes RP
McMurphy and Cool
Hand Luke, or for that matter Huckleberry
Finn, is smart, likable and a natural leader, but bristles at the many
petty indignities of life. His fierce sense of injustice got him
stuck in the Navy in the first place, in order to avoid a jail sentence
for punching a spoiled rich kid, and he has transferred from ship to ship,
seeking the one with the least responsibilities and the loosest discipline.
He's deeply ambivalent about the Navy but does love one thing about it,
the chance to work with ship's engines. He values this opportunity
for what is, significantly, a political/spiritual reason :

Machinery only cared about what a man knew and what
he could do with his hands, whether he
was a coolie or an admiral, and that was the secret,
very good thing about machinery.

And Jake's desire to be judged in this impartial and unprejudiced way
carries over into his relations with others, so that he seeks to judge
them on these terms also :

The coolie was an engineer; well then, he was not
a coolie, he was another engineer like Jake
Holman.

His devotion to this simple democratic code, and his loyalty to people
who measure up to its standards, especially the coolie Po-han who he takes
under his wing, makes Jake very appealing and, when added to a thrilling
adventure story set in the China of the 1920's, a society perched on the
edge of Revolution, produces one of my all-time favorite novels (and movies).